and the first words
issued from
the throat-singers.
A Sober Night with Stars
A sober night
with stars,
one swift clean bell.
The copy
send to heaven;
the original
leave in hell.
Plants, Heavy with Berry
Plants, heavy with berry,
in a frost. Not far off,
a house.
A voice, a reason.
A kitchen. Exhausted by choice,
I lie awake
and rise worrying
the same tune,
sit looking for an opening,
then empty-headed
while away the time
with cards
or crosswords,
looking up and around me
as people will
who search for words
and feel ridiculed
by what they do,
beside the muffled Atlantic
or in some city
in mid-afternoon,
looking up and around
as if someone were
watching them,
these malingerers,
afraid of the what-not, then
conscience-stricken
I come to my feet.
Time to go shopping, man, weed
the blasted garden.
Manure the drills,
do your shoes, clear
the walls of lichen.
Not far off, a house.
A voice, a reason.
A kitchen.
The Strange Impasse
So many things happen
while you are looking the other way,
it’s better that you don’t know,
can’t know; leave it,
forget it, it’s not your business,
and of course you get angry over nothing,
then give over. Read without taking in the words,
nod at what you don’t hear,
turn aside and have another beer,
could you say that again, sir?
Again, please, I was elsewhere.
Or maybe it’s the news and you’re
looking straight at what is not happening,
because it will be repeated again
ad infinitum. On the Six or the Seven
another dumb outcry not your own.
Could I have that again, sir?
Daydreaming, when someone is telling you
exactly what they’ve seen or done;
you’re travelling the world in first class,
decrying, in an awkward silence,
that human engineering should lead
to this strange impasse.
The Whispering Shells
for Inor
1
The tide mark
in March
is not seaweed
or shale
but a breathless
line of shells
filled again
with voices
wandering the ward
at nightfall.
2
The sea they hear
is a field of insects
shunted through
all the senses.
The boat they’re on
sails through
my mind, and my mind
founders
out there
on the hush.
3
The lost
are looking
for a break
in the weather
as they bale. They pray
to get better
at landfall,
tomorrow, the day after,
dear God, when
they might look
with wonder
on sanity again.
4
The oarsmen
towards deliverance
from despair
as they paddle the deep
waters of the unnamed,
they sight land
that is not land
but a heave of water that slowly banks high
into cloud and falls down there again.
5
Each man in his cot
calls out
to his fellows —
and back
come their
awesome replies:
I am out here forever.
There is none
to deliver me. And is there nowhere
after this?
6
They search
the empty ocean.
They enter
the cuckoo storm.
The boat is
filled with blue salt,
the music board
shattered.
Sometimes it is too late
to be saved.
7
And then to draw closer
through the slough
of teeming sandflies,
to dock at last
at this strange
drunken coast
where the first thing
each man heard
was his own
whispering shell.
Walls
There was a time
I used marvel over
a green bottle or claypipes
set oddly into a stone wall.
Now that I’ve started
building them
I put everything in,
chains, plastic, shells.
I put in all
I can carry,
wheelbarrows of scraws and more,
if I can find it,
and sometimes
I panic in the windy
open spaces,
and often rest
where there
was nothing before,
and think, well,
the wall under me may lack
the Donlon touch,
the finish of mason and fiddlemaker,
saddler, farmer.
A poor type of man
I am to follow them
who built battery walls
and turned the earth
around to face
the north-west.
So be it.
I look back,
pleased with myself,
as if I’d just climbed
Everest
and was waiting for
the others to arrive.
The Wall I Built
The wall I built
the sea took.
The stones I gathered
the sea scattered.
Falling asleep I look
left, right,
because, you see,
they don’t make
tomorrow like
they used to.
The Sky Road
for Dallan
A summer’s night
we returned unseeing through fog
to the house
to find the mist had stopped
just at the front wall
and, turning back,
we found a glacier,
a long grave white floor
that you would be tempted to walk on,
reaching for miles,
to the prow of the mountain.
On all sides
down hung.
We might have been in a cave
where old dingoes
had ghosted to a standstill
and were trapped
in a frozen drop of hail.
To the left the sea had been swept into a corner.
A roof of a house shedding dew
floated by. And beyond that
an orange light that once marked something
marked nothing at all.
We were alone up there,
above cloud level.
Who slept underneath that bank of mist
did not exist. All landmarks were gone.
We were alone up there on Dooneel,
all sound off
except for the low cough of a cow out there in the stillness.
In front of me the shadow of my son
grows the length of me
and goes beyond me,
beyond our absences and our tempers
down this long white sky road,
this strange sea-bed,
blanketed in fog. No one. Not a stir.
The world down to a whisper.
What Happened at Noon?
What happened
was
all the cats
took off their caps
and looked out to sea,
the hares quit
the rocks,
the waves stopped,
and birdsong
suddenly ended.
Then the light
left me.
A Breeze
I step back from the crossword
and turn to see
the leaves of the dictionary
flap in the breeze
outside on the plastic table
in the gravel yard,
then as the winds increase
the large atlas starts unfolding,
till all the planets
and countries and words
and their meanings
are flying by
as if the books
were being flicked through
by some demented reader
who has lost his place
in the world:
shaman, shiite, shogun,
Mars, adverse, idiom,
to rebuff, to slander,
a fall of hail, vacant, volatile,
Saturn, Sierra Leone,
Azores, otic, wrack, Chad,
China, Cyprus, Rome;
the pages speed by like frames
in those early movies
till it all makes
some kind of story,
a new migration has begun,
the Sahara is crossed,
an oasis named,
the way we came forgot,
the wanderers leave
Gabon for Ghana
and at Jerusalem part
in various languages
to search for meaning again.
Sessa: an exclamation mark.
Jupiter. Limitrophe: on the border.
Hay: a dance. Hush: a rush of water.
Then the wind eases,
the mad search for whatever it was
stops. The breeze has reached
sermocination in Beijing.
The Cat
The cat who has lost her voice
is the cat that calls out loudest.
So it is when the muse goes
into the terrible silence.
Larkin’s Room in a Storm
In the storms I imagine city rooms
where everything is laid out to the touch,
a seat by the window,
binoculars, wine glasses, so much
jazz. Everything in its place
like the first hand of a game of cards.
Outside, a breeze blows through the tombs
of the dead who died in Wandsworth.
A stranger looks into my face.
Wild cats flit through breakers’ yards.
No one is hurrying. The single men are home.
And women stand with cup of tea in hand
watching Coronation Street in Camden.
In some square a computer comes on.
The fifth chapter of a novel is ending.
The Kirk family is spending
Easter on Mars.
I am on the top deck of a bus
that’s turning through slush
down the King’s Road in Chelsea.
In the manager’s office of Pellet and Son
I’m the security man reading Dostoevsky.
It’s after 12. It’s Christmas Eve.
There’s a taxi queue in Clapham.
By the old King’s Head someone shouts,
‘Let me go, just let me fucking at him!’
The rain has stopped. It turns to snow.
We travel on drugs through Pimlico.
A Henry Moore sits by the Thames
but acid does not go art.
Instead we marvel at the shining plinth
and coming back I fall apart
and there I do it again
throwing myself into the traffic
on Vauxhall Bridge
and wake up in Wicklow
in a shed of flea-bitten hounds.
I stand by the sea with the mange.
Everything I look on for years
is permanently strange.
I find myself at a table
eating bacon in Ward’s
Irish House. Once again on a bus,
or a tube, or a street, going
past rampant TVs, booklined walls,
Italian shops, Italian stalls,
The Queen’s merc stalls in the dark,
the ducks are leaving James’s Park,
I’m woken by reggae
in Caldwell Street,
it all comes back,
the arguments, the loss,
then suddenly here I am
in a room by the sea
in blinding sleet
away from all the harm.
And yet I’d like to aspire
to a centrally-heated library,
like Larkin, in rooms where fires
come on at a touch
rather than flailing in the dark
through a stack of turf,
and like him at his best
be thinking of death
after another night of sordidness.
Alone. Vexed.
Better to be abrasive in Hull
than go shouting ‘Go fuck yourself!’
to no one in particular
on a windy peninsula.
One Minute with Eileen
1
After finishing work
I take a shortcut through Soho
and pass an open door
that says: two pounds
for one minute with Eileen.
Well, I ponder this,
then turn and turn about.
The old lady behind the counter
gives me a blue ticket.
Sit there, she says, Eileen
is occupied at present.
I’ll wait on the street, I say.
2
So I took a turn or two
through the Chinese,
like a man about
business in the town,
and soon enough, a youth
doused in gel emerges
head-down
like a duck in thunder
and high-tailed it
in a north-easterly,
and the lady waved me in.
The inside door opened and
I sit in an armchair
facing Eileen.
3
Now, she explains,
I’m a tipsy girl.
If you want to touch me,
that’s twenty; if you want me
to touch you, that’s forty.
Full sex is sixty.
Anything after that
is over a hundred.
And what, I asked,
do I get for my two pound?
You get to hear the prices, she said.
Wonderers
I find myself looking
across at your face
wondering
for the umpteenth time,
who you are,
where you came from,
and then, as always,
begin wondering
who this is,
who is this
that wonders who you are?
And from your face
I can see that for a moment
you too have forg
otten who I am.
How strange
I must be to you
who thinks he knows
you best of all,
how strange you are to yourself,
how strange we all are
to ourselves and others;
like those folk you see in photos
waiting at train stations